In Brief

Each year during the American Library Association’s “Banned Books Week,” librarians display famous books that have been challenged in the past as well as the most frequently challenged books in the present day. This book-centric approach seems to be the standard. By focusing on the books themselves, however, do librarians tacitly concede that these books are indeed controversial? Defending challenged books on their merits, as in typical Banned Books Week displays, accepts the debate terms set by would-be censors. The problem is not the book; it’s the act of censorship. We should closely examine the motivations and political context of book banning movements in order to face this challenge with a fuller understanding of the problem. This article describes an exhibit at Florida State University Libraries during Banned Books Week 2022 that confronted this problem directly by trying to understand acts of censorship in Florida history. The exhibit, “Against Liberty: A History of Banning Books in Florida,” deployed primary sources readily available online and in the FSU collections to explore who has challenged books in Florida history, and what were their motivations. 

Introduction

Each year in fall, typically in late September, the American Library Association (ALA) sponsors “Banned Books Week,” an annual event observed in libraries across the United States to raise awareness of challenges to the freedom to read and to build community with librarians, authors, publishers, and the reading public. Many librarians take this opportunity to create book displays, often showcasing famous books that have been banned in the past as well as the most frequently challenged books in the present day. In support of such efforts, ALA maintains a webpage that includes a variety of creative ways to display banned books in libraries. In almost every example on the site, the books themselves are the focus, often with some note about their content that has been considered objectionable.¹

But considered objectionable by whom? In describing the current wave of book challenges, the ALA website alludes to “[g]roups and individuals demanding the censorship of multiple titles, often dozens or hundreds at a time,” but doesn’t elaborate further about who these groups are.² PEN America, an advocacy group for writers and free expression, reported that, since 2021, the dramatic increase in the number of book challenges in the United States is largely the work of a movement to “advance extreme conservative viewpoints about what is appropriate and allowable in schools.”³ But who belongs to this movement, and why are they coordinating efforts nationwide to remove books en masse from library shelves across the country? Moms for Liberty, headquartered in Florida, is one of the organizations coordinating today’s book banning movement. For example, Bruce Friedman, a member of Moms for Liberty in Clay County, near Jacksonville, submitted over 400 book challenges to the county school district during the 2022-2023 school year. According to the Tampa Bay Times, which reviewed statewide data on book challenges, over 600 challenges of the total 1,100 received throughout the state that year came from either Friedman or former Escambia County teacher, Vikki Baggett. Baggett presented to the Santa Rosa County chapter of Moms for Liberty in May 2023 to share tips on how to get books removed from school libraries.⁴ The numbers of book challenges are staggering and the coordinated campaign that now extends nationwide, led by well-connected organizations including Moms for Liberty, suggests there is more to this movement than local parents’ concerns. In the face of this powerful movement against the freedom to read, librarians and the reading public need to follow the advice of censorship and intellectual freedom expert Emily Knox and take seriously the book challengers’ reasons for action, both to better understand their motives and to more effectively respond to attempts at censorship.⁵

In the summer of 2022, during what seemed at the time to be the height of the mass book banning movement sweeping public and school libraries in Florida, I decided to respond by rethinking the traditional Banned Books Week display. My goals were to turn the spotlight onto the would-be book banners in order to interrogate their motives and to put the current wave of book challenges into historical perspective. I decided to focus entirely on the state of Florida, where I lived and worked, because it was home to most of the university’s student body, and because the state has been the epicenter of US book banning in the twenty-first century. Based on data collected by PEN America, the 2021-2022 school year was, unfortunately, not the height of book banning, but only the beginning. Since that year, when PEN America documented 566 book bans in Florida, the number more than doubled to 1,406 in the 2022-2023 school year, and then skyrocketed to 4,561 book bans in 2023-2024. Since 2022, Florida has led the nation with the most book bans by state.⁶ Florida has also served as a testing ground for government action, providing a model for other censorious politicians to follow at the state and federal levels.⁷

It is also important to acknowledge that my individual and institutional positionality made it possible to create an exhibit that some might find politically provocative. I was able to proceed in part because of my union membership in the Florida State University chapter of the United Faculty of Florida. As a faculty member covered by the collective bargaining contract, I enjoyed the same academic freedoms and job security as other university faculty and felt empowered to present an honest and historically accurate narrative of book banners in Florida history. Unions are also under threat in Florida; the Republican-controlled legislature regularly passes new laws making it difficult to sustain union membership and legal recognition. However, at the time of my exhibit, the FSU faculty union had succeeded in meeting each new requirement that the state imposed. I also obtained backing from my library Dean, who supported the project enthusiastically. Additionally, as a cisgender white male, I might not be as easily targeted as faculty and staff from historically marginalized groups, especially given the political backlash currently aimed at campus offices and curricula that support the university’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) goals. And finally, working at a large research university library meant that my collections were not the typical targets of coordinated book banning movements, which are more likely directed at public and school libraries.⁸ For all of these reasons, I felt both empowered and compelled to raise my voice on this issue.

In this article, I will share both the content and process of creating my exhibit, “Against Liberty: A History of Banning Books in Florida.” In sharing my historical research and experience creating the exhibit, I hope that library workers and other readers will recognize the core message of my exhibit: that book banning is rarely pursued as a good faith effort to protect readers from harmful content. Rather, as evidenced many times in Florida history, acts of censorship are rooted in struggles for power and social dominance. The three major episodes of book banning that I explored in my exhibit coincided with times of social crisis. In Florida, in the 1830s, in the decades after Reconstruction, and again during the mid-twentieth century Civil Rights Movement, reactionary forces used censorship as one tool in their bid to control the political narrative in times of significant social and cultural change. This historical approach helps us to see continuities between the motives and methods of book banners past and present. With a clearer understanding of these moments of conjuncture and why censors have challenged books in the past, we may be better equipped to respond today by crafting effective policies, procedures, and political advocacy in our communities. As my exhibit showed, the challenges we face are not new, and recognizing the true motives of book banners is essential to resisting the often powerful interests that seek to limit our freedom to read, learn, and imagine alternative futures. 

An Idea Emerges

The idea for this exhibit came together during the summer of 2022, when my graduate course work in nineteenth-century United States history intersected with my role as Humanities Librarian at Florida State University Libraries. As a student, I had recently conducted research on neo-Confederate organizations and how they shaped Southern universities in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. These groups, including the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) and the United Confederate Veterans (UCV), were very concerned about the history being taught in Southern schools and worked to influence the curricula and textbooks used in schools at all levels, including colleges and universities. This research was fresh in my mind when Dr. Laura McTighe, a professor of religion and frequent collaborator with the library, mentioned to me in conversation that she was reading about how, before the Civil War, Southern enslavers passed laws to punish people found with abolitionist books and pamphlets in an effort to prevent the spread of abolitionist ideas. Putting this conversation in context with my research and today’s book banning movement, I was beginning to see similarities between the censors of each time period.

The final catalyst arrived when a library colleague alerted me to a book that had just been returned with a note written on the inside cover page. (Fig. 1) My colleague wanted to know what we should do with a defaced book, and since it was a history book, it fell to me to make this collection development decision. When I saw that the “defacement” was a note saying, “Warning–this is a racist book,” complete with page numbers to the writer’s purported evidence, I was intrigued. As it happened, the writer was correct. The book was a reprint edition of History of Georgia, by Robert Preston Brooks, one of many examples of histories from Dunning School scholars of the early twentieth century. Named for Columbia University historian Archibald William Dunning, who trained many of the scholars who wrote in this tradition, it refers to an interpretation of the post-Civil War Reconstruction era critical of Black enfranchisement and officeholding while sympathetic to the white Southerners who overthrew the Reconstruction governments, often violently.⁹ Here in my hands was a physical manifestation of the neo-Confederate movement I had studied and a modern reader’s act of resistance to it. I decided that instead of deaccessioning the book because of the annotation and the book’s overall poor condition, it needed to go into an exhibit!

Exhibit Logistics

As I conducted further research on book banners in Florida history, I had to consider how I could represent my findings in a physical exhibit. There were several logistical issues to consider in the process. First, the only space available for my display was a small empty wall on the first floor of our main library building. I took measurements of the space to keep in mind as I selected objects and images to include in the exhibit and worked with colleagues to develop appropriate title banners and signs.

Assembling my exhibit required a bit of resourcefulness. The library did not have locking exhibit cases, so I resolved not to use any rare materials in the exhibit. Instead, most of the objects I displayed were either books from the circulating collection or high-quality scanned images. I borrowed an empty, unused glass-doored cabinet with shelves to place in the center of the exhibit space to hold most of the physical books. A colleague in the library’s technology department was able to lend me a computer monitor, which could be secured with a lock, in order to include a documentary film, played on loop, with permission from the creators.

I printed out scanned images of historical documents and photographs on regular copy paper using the library’s color printer. The quality of the images was high enough that professional printing or high-grade paper seemed unnecessary. I mounted the print outs on pieces of foam core board, cut to size, using double-sided tape. I then affixed these to the wall with adhesive putty. I created exhibit labels using the same process as the scanned images, paying close attention to the font, size, and amount of text on each label.¹⁰ All of the materials described here were easily procured from a local office supply store for about $70, which the FSU Libraries was able to reimburse. I did most of the printing, cutting, and mounting. The FSU Libraries Special Collections and Archives provided book stands and the mylar strips I used to hold open one of the books on display. My colleagues in the marketing and communication department designed the main logo and printed out the exhibit title sign on the department’s large format printer, so I did not have to account for those costs. Other colleagues helped me to move the cabinet into place, and to set up the computer screen for the documentary. I also created QR codes for some of the object labels with links to related content that couldn’t easily be incorporated into the physical exhibit. After several weeks of researching, final installation took about two days. The exhibit ran from September 19, the start of Banned Books Week 2022, until Thanksgiving break. (Fig. 2)

“Incendiary Publications” in Antebellum Florida

Throughout Florida’s history, citizens and state agents have used book banning as a form of power to protect their cultural dominance and wealth. In the 1830s, where my exhibit began, enslavers attempted to censor abolitionist ideas in order to prevent slave revolts and other threats to their control of human property. Slave owners had convinced themselves that if enslaved people resisted, ran away, or revolted, as happened frequently throughout the Americas, then it must be because abolitionists had incited Black people to seek freedom. So, assuming that slave resistance was due to “outside agitators,” Southern state legislatures passed laws prohibiting enslaved people from learning to read, interfered with the US Postal Service, and restricted the movements of Black sailors and local free people of color who might distribute abolitionist books and pamphlets.¹¹ Such measures reached a fever pitch in the 1830s in part because segments of the ruling class had come to embrace abolitionism on both sides of the Atlantic, particularly in the US North and in Great Britain among evangelical Protestants and the ascendent industrial elites.¹² Enslavers in the US South had previously benefited from the general acceptance of slavery among merchants and manufacturers, at least when limited to the southern states. But beginning in the 1830s, the Slave Power encountered growing resistance in Northern and British newspapers, popular literature, and political speeches as slavery expanded into Florida and some of the western territories created out of the Louisiana Purchase. 

One famous example of abolitionist literature that sparked such paranoia and repression was David Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles, to the Coloured Citizens of the World. (Fig. 3) Walker, the son of an enslaved man and free Black woman, used the US Postal Service to circulate his Appeal from his home in Boston. In it he denounced slavery, called on the “coloured citizens” of the world to rise up against their oppressors, and asked White, Christian enslavers to recognize their sins against God and against liberty.¹³ 

Several Southern states passed laws banning such abolitionist literature. The Florida legislature drafted a similar ban (Fig. 4), but it was never enacted owing to Florida’s status as a federal territory at the time. Presumably the federal government wasn’t going to approve a law so prejudicial against its own Postal Service. There were also white Floridians who opposed the law because they felt it would give more legal protections to abolitionists than they deserved. One such group, meeting in 1835 at Shell Point, a coastal town south of Tallahassee, proclaimed that the proposed law against incendiary publications “dignifies the question…subjecting it to the operations of a Grand Jury,” when instead the citizens already have the right “to act in that summary and efficient way, according to the first great dictates which the God of nature has implanted in the bosoms of men.”¹⁴ In other words, a local vigilance committee could enact their own justice, likely by assaulting or lynching any suspected abolitionist. 

In the exhibit, I paired these attempts to restrict abolitionist literature in the 19th century with evidence of similar reading restrictions enforced by the Florida Department of Corrections (FDC), which has banned over 20,000 publications from Florida prisons.¹⁵ The scale of the FDC’s book banning is considerable, but so too is the scale of incarceration in Florida. The FDC is Florida’s largest state agency and the third largest state prison system in the country, with an operating budget of $3.4 billion.¹⁶ According to the Prison Policy Initiative, in 2023 over 80,000 Floridians were incarcerated in state prisons. Add to that local jails and federal prisons, and over 157,000 Floridians were behind bars, equivalent to 795 prisoners for every 100,000 Floridians, an incarceration rate higher than the US as a whole.¹⁷

Among those books banned in Florida prisons is Tallahassee attorney Reggie Garcia’s book, How to Leave Prison Early, a guide to navigate the state’s clemency, parole, and work release laws and procedures. It may seem shocking that a guide to legal remedies available to incarcerated men and women should be kept from the very readers who could use it most, but to admit that those in prison deserve such relief seems to challenge the power and control of the prison system. 

Controlling the Narrative in the Era of Jim Crow

After the Civil War, societies like the United Confederate Veterans (UCV) and the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) formed to protect the legacy of their Confederate ancestors and to reclaim their cultural power and social status by promoting the “Lost Cause,” a distorted memory of the antebellum South that helped to legitimize the social and racial hierarchies of the Jim Crow South. These Southern elites focused especially on schools and universities, where control of textbooks and curricula were essential to reestablishing ideological hegemony after the end of Reconstruction. Convinced that the “vindication of the South must come from the pens of southern writers,” the History Committee of the UCV established guidelines for selecting history textbooks to be used in southern schools. As reported in the UCV’s magazine, Confederate Veteran, all histories published in the North were suspected of sectional “prejudices” against the South and were excluded outright from consideration for school adoption.¹⁸ (Fig. 5)

Southern authors filled the void left by these banned books with histories of their own, justifying the Southern rebellion as both honorable and Constitutional, while also softening the image of plantation slavery. This project was not limited to the academic histories written by students of Columbia professor William Archibald Dunning, as mentioned above. Caroline Mays Brevard, a historian, author, and scion of two powerful Florida families, taught at Leon High School in Tallahassee and at the Florida State College for Women, predecessor of today’s Florida State University. Brevard’s 1904 book, A History of Florida, which romanticized plantation society and made heroes of the aristocratic enslaver class, was used as a textbook in Florida schools for two decades.¹⁹ The myth of the “Lost Cause” that this and many other books promoted took hold by the turn of the twentieth century and became the dominant historical interpretation of American history in white-controlled schools and in popular culture.²⁰

The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) was particularly successful in controlling which histories were taught in schools. In addition to creating their own evaluation criteria and lists of approved textbooks for Southern schools, the UDC coordinated attacks on anyone who contradicted their Lost Cause mythology.²¹ When Enoch M. Banks, professor of history at the University of Florida published an academic article stating that the South was “relatively in the wrong” about slavery and the Civil War, the UDC led a public campaign against him. The Florida UDC President, Sister Esther Carlotta of St. Augustine, proclaimed that his “writings proved him so unjust to the South’s attitude in 1861 as to unfit him for that position.” In 1911, Banks was forced to resign his position and left the state.²²

In the exhibit, I paired the work of neo-Confederate groups working to control the official history of the South with contemporary debates over American history and the role of slavery in the founding of the United States. The Pulitzer-Prize winning 1619 Project was a frequent target for conservative politicians and activists who resisted a more inclusive and honest accounting of the history of American slavery, and in November 2022, the Florida Board of Education finalized a rule that prohibits using any material from the 1619 Project in K-12 education. The Rule likens the historical interpretations put forth by 1619 Project editor Nikole Hannah-Jones and other contributors to Holocaust denial and goes on to say that K-12 instruction “may not define American history as something other than the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.”²³ Thus, just as the UCV and UDC worked to ban books deemed counter to their preferred narrative of the Civil War while filling the void with their own approved histories, so too has the Florida Board of Education excluded works that question the morality of existing racial power structures while limiting what Florida teachers may discuss in their classrooms.

The Fight Against Civil Rights

In the mid-twentieth century, some Florida politicians invoked the threat of communist subversion in their efforts to resist racial desegregation and the expansion of civil rights, an existential threat to legal white supremacy in the Jim Crow South. The Florida Legislative Investigation Committee (FLIC) led the charge, using McCarthy-style tactics to attack civil rights activists, especially those affiliated with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). When the FLIC, better known as the Johns Committee after its chairman, State Senator Charley Johns, failed to slow the advance of Black civil rights in the law, the committee expanded its search for cultural and political subversives to Florida’s universities. Taking advantage of the so-called Lavender Scare, a nationwide panic over homosexuality and its alleged affinities with communism, the Johns Committee reframed their anti-civil rights crusade as an attempt to root out homosexuality from Florida schools and public life.²⁴

The Johns Committee found a useful ally in September 1961 when Jane Stockton Smith of Tampa complained to the Dean of the College of Basic Studies at the University of South Florida (USF) that the textbooks her son, Skipper, brought home were anti-religious and emphasized sex and evolution. In an interview that year she identified several specific books that she found obscene, communistic, and “one-sided,” including John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and The True Believer by philosopher Eric Hoffer, a book about mass movements that challenge the status quo.²⁵ Smith was instrumental in bringing a Johns Committee investigation to USF. She participated in what the Tampa Tribune described as an “unorganized parents’ group” alarmed by what Smith claimed were “reams of evidence to concern every citizen” and USF course readings that she alleged to be pornographic and anti-religious. USF students were reportedly questioned about “political ideologies expressed on campus and about sex predominance in required reading assignments.”²⁶

In 2011, students taking a documentary film class at the University of Central Florida (UCF), created a documentary about the Johns Committee. Simply titled, “The Committee,” the film features interviews with two North Florida survivors and one investigator from the Committee’s attempt to root out LGBTQ teachers and students from state universities. In their research, they found that over 200 students and teachers were expelled or fired from Florida universities as a result of the Committee’s anti-LGBTQ efforts.²⁷ After receiving permission from Lisa Mills, one of the course instructors, I included this award-winning documentary in my exhibit, played on a loop through a computer monitor positioned on a small table below the related images of documents and newspaper clippings. As of this writing, “The Committee” remains available for streaming online via PBS. 

Florida libraries could also be complicit in the Lavender Scare by censoring materials in their own collections. A letter written in 1960 to then Director of FSU Libraries, Orwin Rush, asked that an intern working with the FSU Graduate School’s Institute of Human Development be permitted to check out some books on homosexuality and clinical problems related to his work which were held “under restriction” at the library.²⁸ (Fig. 6) I did not find archival evidence that described the exact form of these access restrictions, but this kind of “protective storage” may still exist in some libraries. My colleague at FSU Libraries, Norman “Trip” Wyckoff, confirmed that Strozier Library still had a locked cabinet of restricted books in the early 2000s, though at the time of my exhibit it no longer existed and it was unclear when it had been removed. I remembered a similar locked cabinet at Tulane University’s Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, my previous place of employment, which in the 2010s included, among other titles, the coffee table book Sex, by Madonna, and a book about foraging for psychedelic mushrooms.

Echos of the Past in 21st-Century Book Banning 

The exhibit ended with the Johns Committee’s anti-LGBTQ crusade, but the parallels between today’s wave of book bans and Jane Stockton Smith’s “parents group” and its alliance with the Johns Committee are easy to see. While today’s Florida State Legislature has been an active participant in censorship, the 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization, Moms for Liberty, has also played a key role. As an organization, Moms for Liberty has made book challenges one of their signature issues, providing resources on their website such as book reviews of disfavored titles and lists of their own approved book publishers, seeming to take a page directly from the playbook of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. In addition to these resources, Moms for Liberty links members to the Leadership Institute’s “School Board Activism” training course, “designed to equip conservative leaders with tools and tactics to influence education,” alongside TurningPoint USA’s School Board Watch List, which purports to identify school board members who “support anti-American, radical, hateful, immoral, and racist teachings in their districts.”²⁹ Moms for Liberty also has ties to the Republican Party, evidenced by both the activities of the group’s founders and by the list of speakers that have attended their conferences, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and their endorsement of Donald Trump in 2024.³⁰ As in the 1960s, local activists today have found support from powerful political players in the state and at the national level, fueling a coordinated effort to exert power over their communities by controlling access to reading materials and deciding which stories can be told in books and in school curricula.

It may be too soon to apply historical analysis to Moms for Liberty and the current book banning movement. However, when compared to my exhibit’s three major episodes of book banning in Florida history, we might conclude that the reactionary forces of the 2020s are responding to a similar social crisis and are seizing an opportunity to assert control. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement destabilized the ideological status quo of the nation, peeling back the veneer of multiculturalism to reveal persistent and often deadly racial disparities and discrimination in American society, especially in health care, labor conditions, and in the criminal justice system. The wave of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives that followed in corporate and educational settings, however superficial they may have been, may have signaled to some conservative forces the opening of a new front in the ongoing culture wars. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was among the first political leaders to reframe COVID safety precautions and DEI trainings as infringements of individual liberties.³¹ Moms for Liberty amplified this message with demands that their individual parental rights be allowed to override pro-social institutional rules like school vaccination requirements and masking in classrooms. The policy solutions coming from these reactionary forces go well beyond banning books and suggest a broader ideological motivation. For example, at the same time that the state legislature imposes content restrictions on teachers and librarians in public schools and libraries, and as the book banners demonize librarians and teachers as groomers and pornographers, they are also in league with one another to expand school voucher programs to shift more public funds into private schools in the name of individual choice and personalized learning.³² Is the contemporary book banning movement part of an effort to delegitimize and defund public education and public libraries altogether? These preliminary ideas require further study, but it does seem clear that Moms for Liberty and their political allies are using the same tactics as Florida book banners of the past in order to control cultural institutions like schools and libraries and to impose their ideology on the rest of civil society. 

Reflection

Looking back, I think my first solo exhibit was successful in examining the motivations of Florida’s book banners and revealing the continuities of censors’ goals throughout Florida history. In this regard, the director of the History Department’s public history program was very complimentary of the exhibit design and content. Student engagement, on the other hand, was somewhat limited. The location wasn’t ideal for attracting attention; that space in the library wasn’t getting a lot of traffic in part because of service changes to the Starbucks café in the library. I only recorded about a dozen links to the QR codes, most of which came from the link to the prison book ban database. The location also made conducting observations in the space impractical, so I was not able to see how passers-by engaged with the exhibit. Had the exhibit been in view of the circulation desk, it might have been easier to unobtrusively see if students were stopping to engage with the content. That said, the exhibit was a hit with some of the faculty and I was asked to integrate both the exhibit and its subject matter into information literacy sessions for three different courses. Thus, the exhibit did serve as a vehicle for outreach to teaching faculty and generated three instructional opportunities.

In November 2023, I relocated and took a new position as Head of Research & Instruction at the Monroe Library of Loyola University New Orleans. When we celebrated Banned Books Week at Loyola in September 2024, I was able to draw upon my experience with the “Against Liberty” exhibit. The disruption of Hurricane Francine shortened our planning time, so we were not able to mount a full-scale historical exhibit similar to “Against Liberty,” but we augmented a traditional display of commonly banned books in the library lobby with a few examples of historically challenged books and accompanying exhibit labels for context. In addition to some examples I reused from the FSU exhibit, I added Monroe Library’s copy of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, which I found gathering dust in the stacks. Our copy was published in 1948, the last edition printed. The Church formally abolished the Index in 1966, though not as a move to exonerate the forbidden books, but rather to shift responsibility to individual readers to avoid immoral reading.³³

Once again, the historical content seemed to create more opportunities for engagement with faculty than with students. The more successful initiative with students was a pop-up trivia table set up in the quad outside the library building, an initiative of Dr. Julia Miller in our Teacher Education program. The spread of commonly challenged children’s and young adult fiction on the table attracted plenty of attention from students walking by who recognized some of their favorite books. Once engaged, we asked them trivia questions about challenged books and music, largely drawing examples from the last 50 years. Students were surprised at some of the books on the table and examples from the trivia questions.

In conclusion, the success of my exhibit at FSU and the more recent activities at Loyola depended on the audience. I will include historical context in future banned books exhibits, but I am also convinced that this needs to be paired with some other interactive modes of engagement to capture students’ attention and start a conversation. While the standard Banned Books Week exhibit may draw attention to individual titles that students recognize, librarians and teachers must find ways to engage students in questions about who bans books and why. By recognizing the motivations of censors, students and educators together may more effectively resist attempts to limit access to information and a quality education. Understanding the historical context of book banning is also critical for librarians. Our work as educators and culture bearers will always be implicated in struggles for cultural dominance, and we must be prepared to defend ourselves and our values in this and future culture wars.³⁴ We must find ways to refuse the authoritarian agenda of the book banners. Recognizing the political agendas and methods of potential book banners will help us to create library policies and procedures that remain responsive to our local communities while discouraging coordinated, bad faith assaults on our staff, collections, and the freedom to read.

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Acknowledgments

Many thanks to my publishing editor, Jaena Rae Cabrera, and my peer reviewers, Ian Beilin and Niki Fullmer. This project was substantially improved in response to their insightful feedback. Special thanks to Dr. Laura McTighe, whose collaboration was critical to starting the exhibit project, and to Mimi Bilodeau, who found the “defaced” book that sparked so much inspiration. Thanks to history professors Dr. Katherine Mooney, for her input on the exhibit’s historical content, and Dr. Jennifer Koslow, for her expertise in exhibit design. I also want to acknowledge everyone at FSU Libraries who helped me assemble the original exhibit at FSU: Rachel Duke, Emory Gerlock, Devon McWhorter, Laura Pellini, and Dan “Brew” Schoonover. Special thanks to my wife, Sarah Withers, who inspires me every day and also helped me during final installation of the exhibit.

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References

Periodicals

• AP News
• Confederate Veteran
• The Floridian
• Newsweek
• Orlando Sentinel
• Politico
• South Santa Rosa News
• Tallahassee Democrat
• Tampa Bay Times
• Tampa Tribune

Manuscripts

• Florida State University Library Records, HUA 2020-006. FSU Special Collections & Archives, Tallahassee, Florida.
• John W. Egerton Papers, 1961-1965, MS-1965-03. University of South Florida Libraries, Special Collections, Tampa, Florida.
• Territorial Legislative Council Records, 1822-1845. State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory. Tallahassee, Florida.

Websites

American Library Association, “Banned Books Week Display Ideas,” https://www.ala.org/bbooks/bannedbooksweek/ideasandresources/display. 

American Library Association, “Censorship by the Numbers,” https://www.ala.org/bbooks/censorship-numbers. 

Committee, The. “About the Film,” https://thecommitteedocumentary.org/. 

Florida Department of Corrections, “About the Florida Department of Corrections,” https://fdc.myflorida.com/about.html. 

Florida Department of Education, State Board of Education, “Required Instruction Planning and Reporting,” Florida Administrative Code Rule 6A-1.094124, https://www.flrules.org/gateway/ruleno.asp?id=6A-1.094124. 

Florida Division of Historical Resources, “Caroline Mays Brevard,” https://dos.fl.gov/historical/museums/historical-museums/united-connections/women-in-history/caroline-mays-brevard/.

Moms for Liberty, “School Boards,” https://portal.momsforliberty.org/resources/other-topics/school-boards/.

Prison Policy Initiative, “Florida Profile,” https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/FL.html. 

Secondary Sources

Bailey, Fred Arthur. “Free Speech at the University of Florida: The Enoch Marvin Banks Case.” The Florida Historical Quarterly 71, no. 1 (1992): 1–17.

———. “The Textbooks of the ‘Lost Cause’: Censorship and the Creation of Southern State Histories.” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 75, no. 3 (1991): 507–33.

Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001.

Braukman, Stacy Lorraine. Communists and Perverts under the Palms the Johns Committee in Florida, 1956-1965. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012.

Brevard, Caroline Mays. A History of Florida, by Caroline Mays Brevard, with Questions, Supplementary Chapters and an Outline of Florida Civil Government by H. E. Bennett. New York: American Book Company, 1904.

Burkholder, Joel M., Russell A. Hall, and Kat Phillips. “Manufactured Panic, Real Consequences: Why Academic Librarians Must Stand with Public and School Libraries.” College & Research Libraries News 85, no. 6 (June 7, 2024): 254-57. https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.85.6.254.

Cox, Karen L. Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003.

Crockett, Hasan. “The Incendiary Pamphlet: David Walker’s Appeal in Georgia.” The Journal of Negro History 86, no. 3 (July 2001): 305–18. https://doi.org/10.2307/1562449.

Davis, David Brion. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Friedman, Jonathan, Tasslyn Magnusson, and Sabrina Baêta. “Banned in the USA: The Growing Movement to Censor Books in Schools.” PEN America, September 19, 2022, https://pen.org/report/banned-usa-growing-movement-to-censor-books-in-schools/. 

Giroux, Henry A. “Educators as Public Intellectuals and the Challenge of Fascism.” Policy Futures in Education 22, no. 8 (November 1, 2024): 1533–39. https://doi.org/10.1177/14782103241226844.

Graves, Karen. And They Were Wonderful Teachers: Florida’s Purge of Gay and Lesbian Teachers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009.

Hinks, Peter P. To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance. University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997.

Knox, Emily J. M. Book Banning in 21st-Century America. Blue Ridge Summit: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

Lenard, Max. “On the Origin, Development and Demise of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.” Journal of Access Services 3, no. 4 (July 26, 2006): 51–63. https://doi.org/10.1300/J204v03n04_05.

Meehan, Kasey, Jonathan Friedman, Sabrian Baêta, and Tasslyn Magnusson. “Banned in the USA: The Mounting Pressure to Censor.” PEN America, September 1, 2023, https://pen.org/report/book-bans-pressure-to-censor/.

Meehan, Kasey, Sabrina Baêta, Tasslyn Magnusson, and Madison Markham. “Banned in the USA: Beyond the Shelves.” PEN America, November 1, 2024. https://pen.org/report/beyond-the-shelves/.

Paulus, Carl Lawrence. The Slaveholding Crisis: Fear of Insurrection and the Coming of the Civil War. Baton Rouge, La.: LSU Press, 2017.

Poucher, Judith G. State of Defiance: Challenging the Johns Committee’s Assault on Civil Liberties. Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 2014.

Schoeppner, Michael A. Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America. Studies in Legal History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108695404.

Scott, Julius Sherrard. The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution. London: Verso, 2018.

Serrell, Beverly. Exhibit Labels: An Interpretive Approach. Second edition. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

Smith, John David, and J. Vincent Lowery. The Dunning School: Historians, Race, and the Meaning of Reconstruction. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013.

Vose, Robin J. E. The Index of Prohibited Books: Four Centuries of Struggle over Word and Image for the Greater Glory of God. London: Reaktion Books, 2022.

Walker, David. Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles : Together with a Preamble, to the Colored Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly to Those of the United States of America. Written in Boston, in the State of Massachusetts, Sept. 28th, 1829. Second edition. Boston: David Walker, 1830. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.69015000003166.

Weitz, Seth. “Campus of Evil: The Johns Committee’s Investigation of the University of South Florida.” Tampa Bay History 22, no. 1 (January 1, 2008). https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/tampabayhistory/vol22/iss1/5.

Williams, Eric. Capitalism & Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994 [1944].

1. American Library Association, “Banned Books Week Display Ideas,” https://www.ala.org/bbooks/bannedbooksweek/ideasandresources/display. ↩︎
2. American Library Association, “Censorship by the Numbers,” https://www.ala.org/bbooks/censorship-numbers. ↩︎
3. Kasey Meehan et al., “Banned in the USA: Beyond the Shelves” (PEN America, November 1, 2024), https://pen.org/report/beyond-the-shelves/. ↩︎
4. Ian Hodgson, “Florida schools received roughly 1,100 complaints, but about 600 came from one dad and one teacher,” Tampa Bay Times, August 27, 2023; Romi White, “New Legislation Will Help Local Moms for Liberty More Quickly Remove Pornographic Material from Schools,” South Santa Rosa News, May 31, 2023. ↩︎
5. Emily J. M. Knox, Book Banning in 21st-Century America (Blue Ridge Summit: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), vii. ↩︎
6. Jonathan Friedman, et al., “Banned in the USA: The Growing Movement to Censor Books in Schools” (PEN America, September 19, 2022), https://pen.org/report/banned-usa-growing-movement-to-censor-books-in-schools/; Kasey Meehan, et al., “Banned in the USA: The Mounting Pressure to Censor” (PEN America, September 1, 2023), https://pen.org/report/book-bans-pressure-to-censor/; Meehan, et al., “Banned in the USA: Beyond the Shelves” (2024). ↩︎
7. Katherine Fung, “In Florida, Trump Sees Model for National Education Policies,” Newsweek, November 19, 2024. https://www.newsweek.com/trump-desantis-florida-education-1987835. ↩︎
8. Burkholder et al. made a similar observation in their own call for academic librarians to support our colleagues in public and school libraries. See Joel M. Burkholder, Russell A. Hall, and Kat Phillips, “Manufactured Panic, Real Consequences: Why Academic Librarians Must Stand with Public and School Libraries,” College & Research Libraries News 85, no. 6 (June 7, 2024): 254-57. https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.85.6.254. ↩︎
9. John David Smith and J. Vincent Lowery, The Dunning School: Historians, Race, and the Meaning of Reconstruction (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013). ↩︎
10. For more on effective exhibit labels, see Beverly Serrell, Exhibit Labels: An Interpretive Approach, Second edition. (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015). ↩︎
11. Carl Lawrence Paulus, The Slaveholding Crisis: Fear of Insurrection and the Coming of the Civil War (Baton Rouge, La.: LSU Press, 2017); Michael A. Schoeppner, Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America, Studies in Legal History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108695404. Enslavers’ fears were not unfounded as news and ideas did circulate among enslaved communities across the Atlantic world through a variety of informal communication networks. See, for example, Julius Sherrard Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (London ; Verso, 2018). ↩︎
12. The literature on nineteenth-century abolition movements is vast. Two classic works that most inform my interpretation are Eric Williams, Capitalism & Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994 [1944]); and David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). ↩︎
13. David Walker, Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles : Together with a Preamble, to the Colored Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly to Those of the United States of America. Written in Boston, in the State of Massachusetts, Sept. 28th, 1829 , second edition (Boston: David Walker, 1830), https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.69015000003166; For more on Walker’s Appeal and its impacts, see Peter P. Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance (University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997); Hasan Crockett, “The Incendiary Pamphlet: David Walker’s Appeal in Georgia,” The Journal of Negro History 86, no. 3 (July 2001): 305–18, https://doi.org/10.2307/1562449. ↩︎
14. “Meeting at Shell Point,” The Floridian (September 26, 1835): 2. ↩︎
15. James Call, “Banned behind Bars: 20,000 Books Can’t Be Read by Florida Inmates; the List May Surprise You,” Tallahassee Democrat, August 11, 2019, https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/politics/2019/08/09/banned-behind-bars-20-000-books-cant-read-florida-inmates/1934468001/. ↩︎
16. Florida Department of Corrections, “About the Florida Department of Corrections,” https://fdc.myflorida.com/about.html. Accessed January 7, 2025. ↩︎
17. Prison Policy Initiative, “Florida Profile,” https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/FL.html. Accessed January 7, 2025. ↩︎
18. “Report of the Historical Committee of the United Confederate Veterans,” Confederate Veteran 3, no. 6 (1895): 168-9. ↩︎
19. Brevard, Caroline Mays. A History of Florida, by Caroline Mays Brevard, with Questions, Supplementary Chapters and an Outline of Florida Civil Government by H. E. Bennett. New York: American Book Company, 1904. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009582447; “Caroline Mays Brevard,” Florida Division of Historical Resources, https://dos.fl.gov/historical/museums/historical-museums/united-connections/women-in-history/caroline-mays-brevard/. ↩︎
20. Fred Arthur Bailey, “The Textbooks of the ‘Lost Cause’: Censorship and the Creation of Southern State Histories,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 75, no. 3 (1991): 507–33; David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001). ↩︎
21. Karen L. Cox, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003). ↩︎
22. Fred Arthur Bailey, “Free Speech at the University of Florida: The Enoch Marvin Banks Case,” The Florida Historical Quarterly 71, no. 1 (1992): 1–17. ↩︎
23. Florida Department of Education, State Board of Education, “Required Instruction Planning and Reporting,” Florida Administrative Code Rule 6A-1.094124, https://www.flrules.org/gateway/ruleno.asp?id=6A-1.094124. ↩︎
24. The extent and severity of the Johns Committee’s activities were revealed in 1993 when the legislative records were released to the public. David Barstow, “Secrets of State’s Search for ‘subversives’ Revealed.” Tampa Bay Times, July 2, 1993. See also Seth Weitz, “Campus of Evil: The Johns Committee’s Investigation of the University of South Florida,” Tampa Bay History 22, no. 1 (January 1, 2008), https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/tampabayhistory/vol22/iss1/5; Karen Graves, And They Were Wonderful Teachers: Florida’s Purge of Gay and Lesbian Teachers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009); Stacy Lorraine Braukman, Communists and Perverts under the Palms the Johns Committee in Florida, 1956-1965 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012); Judith G. Poucher, State of Defiance: Challenging the Johns Committee’s Assault on Civil Liberties (Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 2014). ↩︎
25. “An Open Interview with Mrs. S____,” John W. Egerton Papers, 1961-1965, MS-1965-03, Box 1, Folder 9. University of South Florida Libraries, Special Collections, Tampa, Florida. ↩︎
26. Steve Raymond, “USF Probe Broadens, Investigators Still Mum,” Tampa Tribune (19 May 1962):A1.
    ↩︎
27. “About the Film,” The Committee Documentary, https://thecommitteedocumentary.org/. ↩︎
28. Wallace A. Kennedy to Orwin N. Rush, January 6, 1960, Florida State University Library Records, HUA 2020-006, Permanent Files, 1958-1963 L-Z, Box 11, Folder “Miscellaneous,” FSU Special Collections & Archives, Tallahassee, Florida. ↩︎
29. Moms for Liberty, “School Boards,” https://portal.momsforliberty.org/resources/other-topics/school-boards/. ↩︎
30. Kathryn Varn, “DeSantis to conservative Moms for Liberty: ‘You gotta stand up, and you gotta fight,’” Tallahassee Democrat, July 15, 2022; Ali Swenson, “Moms for Liberty rises as power player in GOP politics after attacking schools over gender, race,” AP News, June 11, 2023, https://apnews.com/article/moms-for-liberty-2024-election-republican-candidates-f46500e0e17761a7e6a3c02b61a3d229; Ali Swenson, Moriah Balingit, and Ayanna Alexander, “Moms for Liberty Fully Embraces Donald Trump as Election Nears,” AP News, September 3, 2024, https://apnews.com/article/moms-for-liberty-trump-2024-election-harris-7c252c611b5bc73c333a24392b979372. ↩︎
31. John Kennedy, “A Defiant Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis Opens Legislative Session Touting Florida as ‘Free,’” Tallahassee Democrat, January 11, 2022, https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/local/state/2022/01/11/ron-desantis-declares-florida-free-state-speech-attacks-biden-policies/9171715002/;
    Megan Messerly, Krista Mahr, and Arek Sarkissian, “DeSantis Is Championing Medical Freedom. GOP State Lawmakers like What They See,” POLITICO, March 1, 2023, https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/01/desantis-medical-freedom-gop-florida-00084842. ↩︎
32. Executive Office of the Governor of Florida. “Governor Ron DeSantis Announces School Choice Success,” Executive Office of the Governor, Newsroom, January 10, 2025, https://www.flgov.com/eog/news/press/2025/governor-ron-desantis-announces-school-choice-success; Annie Martin and Leslie Postal, “Vouchers for All How Florida Law Is Supercharging School Choice Vouchers Vouchers Wealthy Families, Pricey Schools Reap Millions in Tax Funds,” Orlando Sentinel, February 16, 2025. ↩︎
33. For more on the history of the Index, see Max Lenard, “On the Origin, Development and Demise of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum,” Journal of Access Services 3, no. 4 (July 26, 2006): 51–63, https://doi.org/10.1300/J204v03n04_05; Robin J. E. Vose, The Index of Prohibited Books: Four Centuries of Struggle over Word and Image for the Greater Glory of God (London: Reaktion Books, 2022). ↩︎
34. Henry A. Giroux, “Educators as Public Intellectuals and the Challenge of Fascism,” Policy Futures in Education 22, no. 8 (November 1, 2024): 1533–39. https://doi.org/10.1177/14782103241226844. ↩︎